Waiting to be heard A memoir

THE dubiously accused almost always disappoint, once their full stones are told. It is the crime that magnetizes our attention. Remove the stain of guilt, or at least of strong complicity, and what's left? One more casualty, and casualties don't command interest. They spread unease. And so it is with Amanda Knox - the Seattle college student accused of inducing Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend of one week, to join her in high jinks that led to the murder of her housemate Meredith Kercher when all three were studying in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. The two were convicted, along with Rudy Guede, a Perugino born in Ivory Coast, whose footprint and DNA matched the grisly trail in the room where Kercher's half-naked body was found under a comforter, her throat slit. "Waiting to Be Heard," Knox's detailed account of her experiences, from her arrival in Italy through her trial, imprisonment and eventual release in 2011, after a court overturned her and Sollecito's convictions, seeks, unsurprisingly, to affirm her innocence. It's easy enough to do, given the rickety case presented by prosecutors, who failed to produce solid physical evidence (as experts in Rome found after careful review of DNA samples) or a plausible motive, instead positing a mise-en-scène involving drug-drenched "sex games." Farfetched though the theory was, Knox lent it credibility, thanks in part to her remarkably photogenic presence, highlighted by ill-chosen courtroom attire and her habit of flashing radiant smiles at family and friends in the courtroom. This followed her behavior in the Perugia police station soon after the crime, when she performed yoga exercises and perched, nuzzling, on Sollecito's lap, seemingly untouched by grief. It formed, in aggregate, "demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment," to quote Henry James on Daisy Miller, the not-so-innocent abroad who has been cited as Knox's literary forerunner. The urge to compare the two is irresistible. Like Knox, James's American heroine left observers wondering whether her angelic exterior masked "a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young woman," even if she was "very unsophisticated," as James explains, "only a pretty American flirt." It is this innocence that Knox (assisted by Linda Kulman, a ghostwriter who has collaborated previously with the boxer George Foreman and Socks, the Clintons' "first cat") staunchly insists on, though she abjures any pretense of virginal purity and openly acknowledges that her junior year abroad, paid for by jobs she'd held in Seattle, included a "campaign to have casual sex" and catch up with her more practiced friends. Meredith Kercher, never her enemy in life, has in death become her doppelgänger, Knox writes; they were "both young girls who studied seriously and wanted to do well, who wanted to make friends and who'd had a few casual sexual relationships." There is no mistaking the implication in this last clause. Knox was "no Mother Teresa," as Sollecito puts it in his memoir, "Honor Bound," published in 2012 - but neither was Kercher, who at the time she was killed was steamily involved with a rock guitarist who lived in the apartment downstairs. Sisterly feeling, Knox asserts, impelled her to "help the police track down the person who murdered my friend" rather than find a lawyer or contact the American Embassy in Rome, even as her two Italian housemates, both with law degrees, sought legal counsel. Meanwhile the British Consulate swiftly sent Kercher's posse of British girlfriends to Bergamo, more than 200 miles north, to finish their studies. Knox, left to fend for herself and speaking only limited Italian, was confused, she says, by continual browbeating. As a result, she falsely incriminated the owner of the bar where she had been waiting tables and also placed herself near the crime scene, the main reasons many remain convinced of her guilt. Even now, with four years in prison behind her, Knox seems unaware of the distinction between un-self-conscious innocence and calculated naïveté. Her candid summaries of flings and one-night stands exude triumphalism. This isn't surprising. For today's young women, or many of them anyway, the ideal of sexual freedom seems to derive more from Helen Gurley Brown than from Susan Brownmiller, as some elders, even youngish ones, have unhappily remarked. Writing in The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead worried that Knox's notion of sexual empowerment excludes the prerogative "to say no as well as yes." But there were not always questions of any kind for Knox, the aggressor in more than one instance. A drunken evening at an "over-the-top dance club" leads to her stumbling out of the bathroom to find a boy she liked waiting for her. "I grabbed onto him and kissed him on the mouth." Half a page later, "We went to my room and had sex." Her conquest of the inexperienced Sollecito was just as hasty. She approached him at a classical music concert and later that night went to his apartment. "We made faces until we collided into a kiss. Then we had sex. It felt totally natural." It is a mistake to assume her brazenness is uniquely American. It reflects the attitudes of a global youth culture of "transparency" - or exhibitionism - fostered by social media. Both Knox and Sollecito would pay the price for their explicit Myspace pages: Knox's blog, titled "Foxy Knoxy," and Sollecito's, which included a photo of him wielding a meat cleaver. Kercher, more sophisticated than the others, had made a cameo appearance in a British music video. ALL this is to say the familiar theme of Old World-New World culture clash "inappropriate" young American set loose in the staid medieval Umbrian hill town - misses the actual context in which the case unfolded and attained its worldwide traction. Knox was tried for murder not in James's Italy but in the tabloid carnevale of Silvio Berlusconi's "videocracy," with its buxom cavorting veline, its strippers dressed as nuns, all part of the nation's political theater, much of it broadcast on TV. At one point Knox "was voted Italian television's 'Woman of the Year,' edging out Carla Bruni and Sarah Palin," Nina Burleigh notes in her book "The Fatal Gift of Beauty," the most thorough account of the case. Better than anyone else, Burleigh captures the parallels between Italy and America. In Berlusconi's prolonged moment, "the lowbrow cultural phenomenon of state television," she writes, "is only the clarified essence of American pop culture." Cross-cultural currents of another kind converge in Perugia. Knox describes it as "a college town much like Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Chapel Hill." Burleigh likens it, more accurately, to an "Italian Amsterdam" or, quoting a local official, an "Ibiza for university students." A giant population of 40,000, roughly a quarter of the city's total, is connected with two universities: the Università per Stranieri (the college for foreigners learning Italian, where Knox was enrolled) and the state university (where Kercher had a scholarship and Sollecito was inching toward a degree in computer science). Groups gather nightly on the steps of the Piazza IV Novembre, with its 13th-century pink stone fountain at one end of the austerely beautiful Corso Vannucci, and pursue "a nonstop bacchanalia," Barbie Latza Nadeau, whose reports on the trial were the most exhaustive published in America, observes in her book, "Angel Face." It is a scene thick with drugs, alcohol and sex. "The American girls are more aggressive, eager to nab an Italian lover," Nadeau writes. "Down an alley, a young man has lifted the skirt of his conquest and is having clumsy sex with her under a streetlamp while her drink spills out of the plastic cup in her hand." The picturesque hilltop cottage where Knox and Kercher lived was next door to an open drug market. Thus Perugia in 2007, but also, if somewhat more mutedly, in 1976, when I spent a summer there along with thousands of other young people, ostensibly students but more often transients, from Cameroon and Sierra Leone, Belgrade and Tehran, many selling drugs or looking to buy them, the men usually on the hunt for acquiescent American ragazze and usually finding them. IN March, Italy's highest court overturned the acquittals in the Kercher case and ordered a new trial. If Knox is found guilty, she may face extradition. For now she is free, enriched by a colossal book advance (reportedly $4 million), and she recently completed a well-orchestrated round of TV appearances. She's still in college, "studying creative writing." This last fact is yet another source of disappointment. Knox thanks her ghostwriter for having "turned my rambling into writing," but one wishes she had pursued the natural course of those "rambling" sentences. There are instances of genuine writing in "Waiting to Be Heard." Knox's descriptions of her cellmates, including one who collected food wrappers and inkless pens, "which she stored in her clothing locker, like a squirrel hiding nuts," and "tried to take care of me, in the same way a pet cat that drops a freshly dead rat at your feet thinks it's giving you a gift," convey authentic feeling - more feeling than her tidy assessments of the life lessons she has learned and her protests that "the people who loved me considered my kookiness endearing." Knox has suffered grievously. Few of us can imagine spending four years in prison. But the injustice very likely done to her pales beside the brutal truth of Kercher's death, and no plea for sympathy will ever bridge the difference. Wearing a T-shirt reading "All You Need Is Love," Amanda Knox is escorted into the courtroom in Perugia, Feb. 14, 2009. Knox was voted Italian television's 'Woman of the Year,' edging out Carla Bruni and Sarah Palin. Sam Tanenhaus is a writer at large for The Times.

Much has already been written about Amanda Knox: sensational international tabloid stories dubbing her Foxy Knoxy ; numerous books examining the trial wherein Knox stood accused of murdering Meredith Kercher, her English roommate, while she was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy; a sympathetic tell-all written by her ex-boyfriend, another among the accused; and even a Lifetime movie. But amid the clamoring din, Knox pieced together her defense, not only against the murder accusation and 2009 conviction but also her condemnation in the court of public opinion. Drawing from journals, letters, court testimony, and other written records, Knox recounts how the trip abroad she thought would help her grow up became a kind of nightmare coming-of-age in which she was violently stripped of her naivete and forced to confront her misplaced trust in Perugian officials. She also addresses actions she regrets, including the false accusation she leveled against her former boss. In clear, concise language, Knox offers the definitive story of her trial thus far. However, the saga continues. As of March 2013, her 2011 acquittal had been overturned by Italy's highest criminal court. Required reading for those who can't get enough of this headline-grabbing saga.--Jones, Courtney Copyright 2010 Booklist

Knox's memoir will doubtlessly be gobbled up by those who have followed her imprisonment and trial in Italy. For those who are unfamiliar with the case, her story as she tells it is harrowing: a junior year abroad gone horribly wrong as Knox's British roommate Meredith Kercher was found murdered and Knox and her Italian boyfriend pinned as the killers. Certain passages and turns of phrase (her repeated insistence that she is "quirky," for example) seem strange until it becomes clear that she is responding to tabloid allegations. It's hard to imagine Knox's story will change anyone's mind: those who believe her to be innocent will continue to do so; those who believe her to be guilty will see this book as a lie. Those who have no opinion as to her guilt or innocence will find that, despite its doorstopper proportions, Knox's memoir is a very fast read. Verdict Obviously, this book will circulate. If nothing else, people who think she's guilty will want to hate-read this without generating royalties. Readers of The Monster of Florence will note that prosecutor Guiliano Mignini also appears in the Knox case.-Kate Sheehan, Waterbury, CT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.